this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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UPDATE: after many comments, let me be clear that i have nothing against systemd at a technical level. It indeed solves issues that people had and found it's way in most mainstream distros for good reasons, beside being pushed by Redhat and Debian, which makes for basically every other mainstream distro out there without much choice. I never used it long enough to judge it, and i dont intend to judge it from a technical point of view. I am worried that such a centra piece of technology deeply interwined with linux is under direct control of IBM and Microsoft (who is the employer of the systemd lead). This might mean nothing, or this could be important for the long time future of linux freedom.

I have recently been exposed to a lot of stuff against systemd.

I know its an old debate that has inflamed people for a long time, I am not looking into restarting it as I never took a stance into it in the past anyway.

I am myself a almost 30+ years power user of Linux and I have never used systemd much myself since it never fixed any issues I had with the previous approaches, and since I am a good user of Gentoo, always loved the freedom to just keep using OpenRC and din't ever bother with systemd.

I like the Unix approach and at the same time, if it is not broken don't fix it, is my basic idea. So my approach to systemd has been not of dislike, rather of I don't care, I don't need it. And I never needed it anyway.

After reading trough most of the links below I start to think that maybe my stance could be more than simple technical.

What are other lemmy-ers idea on all this?

I didn't knew about Microsoft taking over the Linux Foundation either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

TLDR: I don't dislike systemd, I never cared about systemd. Do I need to start caring now due to all this non technical issues?

Note: i a copying verbatim the following article to stress that these are not my personal opinions and that i didnt do a proper research on the topic, except reading (most) of the links below.


(The following is a post on the #libreware telegram channel on the 7th/8th of February 2025)

Lennart Poettering intends to replace "sudo" with #systemd's run0. Here's a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact "systemd-run" (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new "root" process.

This isn't the only bug of course, it's not possible on Linux to read the environment of a root owned process but as systemd creates a service in the system slice, you can query D-BUS and learn sensitive information passed to the process env, such as API keys or other secrets.

https://fixupx.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559

Nitter mirror: https://xcancel.com/hackerfantastic/status/1785495587514638559

Here are some links about #systemd #alternatives for #Linux in no particular order. Which are your favorite alternatives and distros?

https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/

https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-systemd.html

https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/

https://nosystemd.org/

https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html

https://the-world-after-systemd.ungleich.ch/

https://ewontfix.com/14/

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=120652

https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/

https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom

https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/linux-systemd-exploit.html

https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-getting-worse/

https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org/why.php

Some more added here too: https://start.me/p/Kg8keE/priv-sec

#systemd #Linux

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Redhat rewrites everything "not invented here" and put these things under "systemd" name. There are misundestanding between people that have political concerns, and people just happy to get unified shiny things. If one day Redhat provides a Systemd-OS I'm sure most people will be happy, and will shit on the previous system, with a separated kernel and the freedom of composing your own OS. Most people just wants an open-source Windows and I can understand that. But I also understand people that are ready to sacrifice some convenience to get a composable OS that can be maintained outside of big companies, thanks to simpler components

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

This is one of the most spot-on replies in this thread. Thanks! I think what you wrote is basically correct.

Only people who cares on how the basics is Linux stays compatible and fully free (as in freedom). But that's fine, as far as systemd can be optional.

[–] Quazatron 29 points 3 days ago (10 children)

A lot of man-hours went into engineering it. Very smart people from many distros went over it, kicked its tires and deemed it good enough to replace old SysV. We've been through this, if you don't like it for some reason, use something else.

It's just software, people, it's not a frelling religion.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

We've been through this, if you don't like it for some reason, use something else.

My god. Yes, we've been through this. You can't just replace Systemd on most distros, because to have the alternatives in the repo, they would have to provide a bunch of shims and wrappers or have two different repos entirely. This is why i dislike Systemd, btw.

And before you start with Gentoo; yes, there it works, because it's source based and Openrc is basically the wrapper.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Wrapper?

Wrapper to what?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

In your head, do you say System D or System'd?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Sys'Tem'd ? /s

[–] just_another_person 16 points 3 days ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Systemd provides a modern user space which fixes a huge number of problems. At first I found it difficult to learn but it had things I needed and I made the effort. I will always be nostalgic about things before systemd because I started using linux in the mid 90s.

I'm not going to throw away my GPU and multi-core CPU and go back to a 386 running dos because multithreaded applications and speculative execution scare me. There is no way to match what modern systems can do by taking old architectures and just adding more gates or faster clock speeds. And there are parallels in software architecture.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a BSD or a non-systemd linux distro if you like. They are still perfectly usable in a lot of situations doing the same stuff people did for years in these systems. If you have a server with a static set of devices that runs a fixed set of services at startup you don't really need systemd. I still have some systems like that but systemd also handles those cases more efficiently and robustly.

You see these sort of link dumps from people who think vaccines cause autism or that some diet will cure cancer. Whatever the intention behind it I always associate it with a bad faith attempt to fuck with people's heads by bamboozling them with more information than they can rationally analyze.

Believe what you want but you might want to consider that all the experts working on systemd and using it productively might know their shit.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Where did you get this idea?

I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the fsf either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

I think you are confusing FSF with the Linux Foundation, and you can see MS as part of the platinum LF members. Was that it, or you really meant FSF?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

You are right... I will fix the top post

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

i like systemd

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago

I really love all the 5+ years old articles about why systemd sucks.
It's not perfect but it's so much better than the plethora of different init methods Linux used to have. Also managing sysv init scripts sucked really bad.
It's lightweight, most of it is optional, it's declarative, it makes managing your systems much easier and it just works.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (7 children)

I don't understand what you are talking about.

I like reading a post with a clear topic and reasoning, unfortunately it's not obivous to me.

Something like "I dislike systemd because XY. What do you think?" Would help me.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Systemd has more features than old SysV init scripts. Particularly around detecting events and taking actions such as starting firewalls when joining networks, turning on battery tools when unplugged from a charger, starting new services when connected to a dock etc.

The other things it does, it does more reliably than sysV init scripts. It starts services concurrently, provides a profiler to improve start up time, contains much less code, provides better security to tapping into the container features of Linux.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Anyway what you describe is done at DBUS level which has nothing to do with an init system. I do have DBUS and works just fine as it would with OpenRC or SystemD either.

SystemD doesn't really help with all that, with OpenRC never had issues with that.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Lennart Poettering intends to replace "sudo" with #systemd's run0. Here's a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact "systemd-run" (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new "root" process.

To my understanding that actually solves issues. A lot of ppl already prefer other tools like doas since sudo is basically "too big" for what it does.

More code means more potential bugs. run0 has to my knowledge significantly less code. And the benefit of not relying on SUID.

In the end, you do you. The big distros will adopt what is good for them and good to maintain. You do not have to use it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How do you know a post was written by a systemd hater? Easy, they'll spell it with a big D for some reason. It reminds me of how Norwegian rabid anti-cyclists are unable to spell "cyclist" for some reason.

Claiming you don't want to restart an old debate and then trying to restart it anyway is pretty funny.

You might also want to keep in mind that you can't really force an init system on Linux distros. Systemd became the norm through being preferred, as in, the people using and maintaining it think it's good. At this point you might as well be ranting about how "LinuX is evil somehow" and we should all be using GNU HURD or Minix or something.

Also: Haven't thought about suckless in well over a decade, maybe closer to two? I guess way back in the day I was kinda intrigued by their ideas and used some of their products; these days I'd rather see them as something between an art shop and people who are playing a somewhat unusual game with themselves, but not particularly relevant to mainstream software engineering.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I've never used another init system, but i see no problem with systemd. The declaritive approach makes things very robust. Surely some things can be improved, but it's a good tool.

Edit: Also managing user services the same way is nice.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Gentoo user here too. I once switched to systemd, but didn't stay using it for too long. Back then some things didn't work with systemd. Nowdays my systems use seatd instead of logind or elogind. Some have musl toolchain. It's just simpler, currently, for me to use OpenRC on all of my setups. But the thing I most disliked with systemd was that it cannot work without journald.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How is musl? Does it make a difference on glibc?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's supposed to be more strict about standards... and maybe lighter in resources. I've been only testing it. Curiosity driven choice. 😉

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Cool! Maybe for a tight, small system is good? Let me know if you come to conclusions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Fellow gentooer! I love how much you can actually decide by yourself how to craft your system with Gentoo.

OpenRC just rocks, a few lines of bash and all is set. But indeed is not for everybody.... (Joking).

[–] Valmond 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't know what systemd does and now I'm too afraid to ask.jpg

Also obligatory fuck microsoft, go crawl and Embrace other stuff.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I was impressed they resisted calling it micro$oft. That's the usual sign of somebody adopting the tribal views of others.

[–] Valmond 1 points 3 days ago

It feels a bit childish to call it microshit, micropenis, micro$oft etc if there is no specific context IMO.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago

Yeah the telegram post that i copied here is indeed pretty polarized against systemd, that's why i reported it integrally because that is not my view, and i think that is dumb to call names microsoft or the like. Still i find it concerning that microsoft and IBM controls somehow systemd and what that means, if it gets even more rooted inside everything in linux.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think when systend goes into systemv, a systemb is born almost a year later

[–] mvirts 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm holding out until SystemE comes out

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] mvirts 1 points 1 day ago

Lol this is amazing. Too bad I'm a Vi user so I'll have to port it. All I need is a name.... Hmmm what would make sense for this one... 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Thanks! That's hilarious....

[–] juipeltje 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I personally don't really care much about the init system. For most of my linux journey i was using arch, then void, then nixos, and now i'm back on void, so i jumped between systemd and runit for a bit. I never chose to use void because of its init system though, i just prefer its package manager. I found both systemd and runit to be fairly simple to use and it just gets out of my way. Poettering working for microsoft has concerned me a little bit, but if i'm being honest that's just me wearing the tin foil hat. I will say though that at this point, if something were to happen to void and i had to move back to arch, i might try using artix just for the style points, and because of me already being familiar with runit anyway.

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